Twitter Stream

April 17, 2009

The news that Ashton Kutcher hit 1,000,000 followers last night was followed by another historic Twitter moment today - the entry of Oprah into the Twitterverse.

Within 24 hours Oprah has amassed 160,000 followers - half of whom I think we can safely assume are house wives who have no idea what's going on but would follow Oprah across the Artic tundra if directed. I think we've jumped the shark.

However! My bitter slash amused reaction to all this celebrity induced hoopula was shifted to 100% amused when I saw this...

"People of the Interweb, today we have done something extraordinarily special. We have shown the world that the new way is here, it's present and it's ready to explore..." -Ashton Kutcher, 2:14am EST, via UStream

Special props to Ogilvy Public Relations for sending me on a west coast business trip (and thunderstorms in middle America that caused our flight to be slightly delayed) so that I could come home at 2am EST and get sucked in to this in the home stretch.

April 13, 2009

Sometimes I love Facebook - just saw this status message from a friend from high school who is apparently bidding adieu to our home town of Ann Arbor, MI aka Ace Deuce. Goodbye tree-town, mitten state,
with your bottles of refreshing pop like faygo, 70mph speed limits,
ubiquity of american cars, friendly strangers, maize-and-blue spirit,
michigan left-turns, and charming vowel-shitting midwestern accents.

Best run down I've seen in.... ever. I'm seriously counting the days until I can get back to the Mich this summer for some good old fashioned highway speeding and vowel shitting. (And Oberon.)

The winning entry was NightPeeps by Melissa Harvey of Arlington. "A gorgeous
re-imagination of Edward Hopper's famous painting "Nighthawks" won the
hearts of the Style staff in a landslide vote. "I wanted to re - create
the bleak urban landscape and the fluorescent light, and add a little
pink and yellow," says Harvey, 44, a graphic designer for WETA who
spent 45 hours over two weekends on the diorama."

I highly recommend perusing all 40 entries - a few of my favorites below. Clearly they are the asshole dioramas that you need a slightly sick sense of humor to enjoy...

Miracle on the HudsonPeeptanamo Bay(Note the poor peep being waterboarded in the background...)

XMen fans everywhere are getting amped for the premier of the XMen Origins series - which begins with Wolverine on May 1. In an interesting, die-hard fan oriented twist Hugh Jackman appeared in a brief YouTube video a few weeks ago stating that the world premier (you know, the red carpet event that usually goes down in LA or New York) will be determined by fan voting.

Anyone can visit the X-Men Origins Premier Map and vote for your town. Interestingly, the winning destination will be chosen based on the percentage of the town/city that votes rather than the total number of votes - ensuring that Dexter, MI can compete against Chicago, IL.

Consumer voting is one of the oldest ways to generate excitement around an event or contest - and social media has allowed these types of competitions to expand the circle of engagement to national, or even international levels. It's fun to see WOM-generating voting contests being scaled up and leveraged for more than karaoke contests and YouTube video contests.

Love Tweet Deck. There is nothing I can say here about its wonderfulness that hasn't been said a million times before. I will comment - however - on their desk top logo situation.

OLD LOGO: Previously the Tweet Deck logo was a black bird with a transparent background. This meant that it was virtually impossible to locate on your desktop. Hilariously, my home computer has an image of the Bird's Nest in Beijing on it - so my Tweet Deck Bird was literally lost in a bird's nest. The first few times I went to launch I thought the logo had disappeared, I literally could NOT find it on my desktop. Strategically placing it in the sky above the Bird's Nest took care of this. NEW LOGO: Needless to say I was pleased when the recent Tweet Deck version update came with a shiny new logo. The black bird is now on a yellow background! I thought this was genius until I realized it was virtually identical to another very important logo on my desktop - my Sprint wireless card. When I sign on or open Tweet Deck it's like a hand eye coordination test for five year olds.